The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Media content may be streamed from, or downloaded to, user devices such as a mobile computing device or a set-top box coupled to a television. The media content, which may include movies, television shows, or music, may be stored at a remote content system and may be presented at the user device in response to a user request. The catalog of media content items available to the user is often vast. To enable the user's selection of media content items for consumption, media content systems often present catalog information identifying media content items available to the user from the catalog of media content items. The catalog information may be in the form of a graphical user interface containing a various thumbnail or “box art” images, where each thumbnail image identifies a particular media content item of the catalog. Users may peruse the catalog information to select media content items for consumption.
The catalog information may be ordered in a particular manner, and the ordering may be customized to a particular user. Media content systems would benefit if the catalog information presented to the user increased user interest and satisfaction with respect to the media content items offered by the content provider system. Although recommendation systems have been available, they tend to recommend content items that are closely related or even the same as content items that the user may have previously viewed, rather than truly new or different content. For example, when a user has viewed a first episode of a particular television series, a recommendation system may tend to recommend viewing of other episodes of the same television series rather than a completely different series, media item or program.